


Half of Us

by gin_eater



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, first curse au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-06
Updated: 2016-04-19
Packaged: 2018-05-05 03:33:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5359556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gin_eater/pseuds/gin_eater
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Delia Savidge is a vet tech at the Storybrooke Pet Shelter who goes home every night to a single-wide trailer and a husband who lives up to his surname. Perceptive bartender Vanessa Murdock has always possessed good listening skills, but finds herself with a chronic inability to speak up, for herself or anyone else.</p><p>Everything changes one day in late October, when the clock tower begins to chime again, and the two women find themselves finally capable of chasing after the things they want – and hunting down those they don’t.</p><p>Basically a QoD-centric season one rewrite/expansion pack, in which Cruella, Ursula, and human!Maleficent are all members of the originally cursed denizens of Storybrooke. Altered backstories and motivations abound. Begins with Sea Devil, with Mal to be folded in as the story progresses. Tags and rating both subject to expansion. Some new characters, all composites of fairy tales/Disney movies/etc. that haven't yet been mined onscreen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_Hel has half of us._ \-- The Greenlandic Lay of Atli

 

* * *

 

  
Vanessa Murdock couldn't remember the exact day the fly on the wall had become the elephant in the room, although whenever it was, she knew she should have recognized the signs before it happened.

It had been a literal fly -- one that had been making the rounds between the bowls of beer nuts laid out every few seats at the bar. Delia had come in alone, which meant she was there for six-packs to take home. Those were the only times Vanessa ever saw her by herself, really, barring the occasional run-in at the supermarket, and even then, "run-in" was perhaps too assertive a description. They noticed each other. Sometimes, they made brief eye contact and shared half-smiles of acknowledgment. They never exchanged hellos.

Vanessa wasn't entirely sure why -- she was a bartender, for crying out loud; she wasn't exactly uneasy around people -- but something about Delia Savidge always tied her tongue in knots, although Delia herself wasn't a particularly imposing woman. She was as tall as Vanessa, but thinner, nearly gaunt, and with a tendency to look lost in her own thoughts, as if reading from a book only she could see. She didn't speak much, but when she did her voice was soft and low and elegantly accented in a way that clashed with the bulk-packet thermals and dollar store scrubs she could usually be found wearing. She did wear a great deal of makeup -- an amount that might have stigmatized her as the town tramp had she not appeared so frumpy otherwise -- but as things stood, most people pegged her as having fallen victim to a kind of desperate yet lazy mixture of early-middle-age vanity and denial; a washed-up, washed-out beauty forever trying to fill her own features back in.

She had flashes of presence here and there, little movie-like moments in which it looked, for an instant, as though her actions or appearance might be meaningful; but then they would pass, and she would fade into the background like an audience member who had accidentally become caught in the glare of a malfunctioning spotlight.

And then one day, Vanessa had nonchalantly swatted a fly away from a nearby beer nut bowl, and Delia had flinched from the motion with such reflexive severity that she'd nearly stumbled backwards over a bar stool, and all at once that flickering spotlight had revealed itself to be a beacon fire.

Delia had tried to play it off, of course -- had forced a harsh-sounding laugh and made a crack about her own clumsiness one day being the death of her -- but for Vanessa, everything suddenly made the most heartbreaking kind of sense.

The way she'd nurse a single glass of beer throughout the night while her husband pounded back pitcher after pitcher. The fearful discomposure with which she'd rummage through her pocketbook whenever a dent had to be made in her husband's tab, face burning with humiliation, temples throbbing as she clenched and unclenched her jaw. The heavy, smoky eyeshadow that could be used to blend a bruise into nothing more alarming than one miserable woman's pathetic stab at resurrecting the glory days of her flamboyant youth.

Vanessa knew, in the space of seconds, exactly what was going on, and for the first time in her life that she was aware of, she wanted very much to kill a man.

She stopped by Dr. Hopper's little lobby before work one afternoon, and left with half-a-dozen dusty pamphlets on how to spot, prevent, and help victims of domestic violence. After reading through the checklists with a morbid certainty that left her feeling punched in the stomach herself, she memorized the bullet-pointed what-to-dos. Don't judge. Don't push. Offer open-ended support, non-threatening availability. She stared at the hotline numbers until they left an after-image on her vision when she looked away, and the next time Delia walked into the bar alone ...

... Vanessa said nothing. Opened her mouth, but found a line of excuses queuing behind her tongue, crowding out her voice.

What if she was wrong? What if Delia really was just a clumsy, withdrawn woman with an excessive fondness for black eyeliner? What if she took offense and told her husband, and her husband told Vanessa's boss, and Vanessa lost her job for having harassed and slandered two longtime customers? She was a bartender: hers was to listen, not to intervene, advise, or accuse. She had no right, it wasn't her place, their lives were none of her business.

And so she'd handed Delia two six-packs without a word but with what she hoped was a sympathetic smile -- one Delia didn't seem to notice anyway, staring instead at the beer as she fished a crumpled ten dollar bill out of her battered handbag. Thinking of the eggshells the drink would scatter throughout her single-wide that she would need to pick through until her husband passed out? Or simply of what she had leftover in the fridge that could be cobbled together for that night's dinner?

Vanessa didn't ask; didn't do anything but watch Delia leave, blonde head down and fists tight around the handles of the beer cartons.

The story stayed the same for weeks -- months, maybe. (Years, she would later learn.)

Most nights, Andrew Savidge came in alone. He was a big man, tall and brawny, with a full, glossy beard that had remained coal black even as his hair had silvered at the temples. Vanessa had always thought of him as looking particularly lumberjack-y, even for small-town Maine, with a revolving closet of jeans, work boots, and the same five flannel shirts, all of them stained here and there with dark substances that didn't bear thinking about. He was a taxidermist by trade, and while he wasn't known to do much business outside of hunting season, he certainly smelled otherwise -- always of the same vaguely off-putting mix of solvents, sweat, and sawdust.

In public, at least, he could hold his liquor -- or hold it differently, in any case, than the bitter and belligerent Leroy. In his own words, he "just liked to watch" -- to hole up in a corner, drink his beer, and survey the room as though it were theater. Vanessa wasn't sure if it made her job easier or more difficult that he never caused a fuss, but she couldn't kick him out just for the chill that oiled up her spine whenever she noticed his eyes lingering on the form of a female patron, or every so often, on herself.

They were never on his wife, even when she was with him. His hand on her thigh, sometimes, but never his attention, and likewise, Delia seemed to neither desire nor dare to deflect it. Her own gaze shifted between the table and the television sets, from the legs of other customers to the door. Bored? Anxious?

Sometimes Dr. Whale would stop in, and he and Andrew would commandeer one of the pool tables to play game after game, which Delia would watch without comment, eyes absently following the path of the cue ball, blinking every time it cracked against one of the other billiards.

How many times had Vanessa followed her into the bathroom with a movie-of-the-week script in her head, only to turn tail the instant the toilet flushed and dart inside the second stall just before Delia emerged from the first? How many times had she rationalized her cowardice over the sound of a running faucet? _She doesn't need to be abused to be unhappy. Not every man with a drinking problem is a wife-beating bastard. What if it's breaking her heart to see him sunk this low and she's here even though she hates it because she wants to be with him regardless? What if she's just plain got other shit on her mind? You don't know. You don't know anything. Don't rock the boat; you can't fucking swim anyway._

It was a deplorable, helpless feeling, as though an invisible hand eeled up from her stomach to pull her voice down to where it could only echo against the walls of her ribs, and Vanessa hated it, hated it and hated herself for always knuckling under it, because it didn't only happen with Delia. A coworker needed her to cover their shift? One plaintive _please_ and Vanessa was working a double that day. Someone cut in front of her in line at the movies, the pharmacy, a convenience store? She grit her teeth and said nothing: two more minutes of waiting wasn't worth ten of a confrontation. Hell, she didn't even honk her horn at traffic signals when the car in front of her failed to notice the light had changed from red to green.

An entire existence built around accommodating the selfish obliviousness of other people. Pathetic. How could she expect to help another person in actual dire straits when she didn't even have the sand to point out to a cashier that she'd been charged regular price for a sale item?

Of course, that didn't stop her dreaming when she fell into bed every morning, helped there by good friends jack-and-ginger; didn't stop her hoping, wishing, praying for the best, wanting to be wrong even as she spun scenarios in her head where she spoke up or gave chase, or followed Delia home to Firefly Hill Estates, where Vanessa would wait and listen for a reason to call 911. She would picture Delia, tearful but unharmed, with Vanessa's arms around her as they watched Sheriff Graham take Andrew away in the back of a police car, and in her mind's eye they would cling to one another until sleep overtook her like a dark cloud, an inky fog that spread over the scene of her fantasy and ensured that she awoke every afternoon with empty arms and an inexplicable ache in her chest.

The twenty-third of October, 2011, began in much the same way: Vanessa opened her eyes to what dim light was permitted around the edges of her blackout curtains, curled on her side and confused, for a split-second, as to why she was alone. The digital clock on the bedside table told her it was a little before 2:00 p.m., giving her just long enough to shower and dress and make it to Granny's in time for lunch to still be on special.

She sat at the bar and ordered her usual -- coffee and a lobster roll -- and eavesdropped as Marco, in conspiratorial tones, informed Ruby that Leroy had had a roommate in the drunk tank the night before.

"Henry's birth mother, all the way from Boston!"

Ruby gasped at an appropriately dramatic volume, then frowned. "Wait, I thought Henry was born in Arizona? How crazy is it that they still ended up living so close?"

Marco shrugged. "That's family. My Paola, may she rest, she and I shopped at the same market on the same day, but at different times, every week for ten years. She would come in, I would leave. A whole decade of this, until one day I forgot a jar of olives, and had to go back. And then I saw her."

His old eyes grew fond and faraway, and he smiled; then, shaking himself back to the present, he sighed and shrugged again.

"The people you are meant to be with, fate positions you just so; then, when the timing is right, it gives you just the nudge you need to act, like a spring." He flicked the air. "But you have to keep walking to meet it, even after that momentum is gone."

"Meet what?" asked Ruby.

"Destiny, of course. It's not something that just _happens_ to you. One day, maybe you find some wood; another day, a gear; and another and another, until you have all the makings of a clock -- but until you do something with them, it's just a pile of parts. You may know the purpose of each and every one, but they will never tell you the time, until you put in the work and make what is possible into reality."

"Do you think she will? Put in the work?"

Marco looked ambivalent, but hopeful. "If I had a boy, I would. It is a parent's responsibility to carve their children as well as they can. Find their weak spots and whittle them down, or reinforce them with love. Mayor Mills, I think she tries to do this, the best way she knows how; but she is mahogany, and the boy tender holly. This new woman, perhaps she will be flexible willow, and bridge the gap between them."

"Or drive a bigger wedge," Ruby pointed out. "That kid is not a happy camper."

She left to top off another customer's iced tea, and Vanessa finished her meal to the background noise of Marco's words of wisdom repeating in her head.

It was ten minutes till nine -- last call on Sundays -- and Vanessa had just given up hope, when the Rabbit Hole's main door opened, and Delia Savidge walked in alone.

As was her habit, the blonde made a quick scan of the room, then perched herself at the corner of the bar where to-go orders were taken and picked up.

Vanessa slid Keith his final whiskey of the night, and took a breath before making her way over.

"Long day?" she asked, and Delia nodded before she'd even registered that the question was different from Vanessa's ordinary "The usual?"

"What?" said the blonde, blinking. "Oh, no -- yes -- it ..." She shrugged and nervously tucked her hair behind her ears. "It was a day. You know how it is."

"I do."

Unsure of where to go from here, Vanessa felt a couple of seconds awkwardly ooze their way past.

"Um. PBR?" she asked.

"Yes, please," Delia let out in a breath, relieved at the return to conversational normalcy.

"Stupid," Vanessa muttered to herself from the safety of the kitchen, retrieving two six-packs from the beer fridge and replacing them with two more. "Just stick to the fucking script."

And she did, ringing Delia up with no further pleasantries aside from a smile -- until she looked down just as the front door swung closed behind Delia's departing back, and found a set of keys lying abandoned on the bar, their attached ASPCA lariat leaving no doubt as to their owner.

Without giving herself time to think, she grabbed them and jogged outside.

Delia had just set one of the cartons on the roof of her old white Mercury when Vanessa called out her name. She spun around, eyes wide, and the bartender slowed her approach, holding out the keys as she might a scrap of food to a feral animal.

"You forgot these," Vanessa said. "Figured you wouldn't get very far without them."

Delia looked at the keys, brow furrowed for a moment before she recognized they were her own.

"Oh! God. Thank you." She took them, clutched them in her hand like a talisman. "I'm such an idiot ..."

"No you're not," Vanessa assured her. "It happens. Jesus, sometimes my mind blanks on the recipe for rum-and-coke." She smiled, self-deprecating and sympathetic, and Delia smiled back -- small and uncertain, but genuine -- and tucked her hair behind her ears again.

"You're, uh ... you're very kind."

"Not really," Vanessa said. "I just--"

A deep, resonant sound startled them both, and as one, they looked to the clock tower, and stared in amazement as it chimed out the hour.

"That's odd," remarked Delia. "I don't think that's worked as long as I've lived in this town."

"Me, either. Guess they finally got around to fixing it."

"Must have done."

They exchanged glances, and for a handful of seconds, things felt completely comfortable between them, as if somewhere along the line, their ships had paused in their nightly passings and made meaningful contact.

It was so easy that it wasn't, once they noticed the feeling; so surprising that both shied self-consciously away.

Vanessa folded her arms across her chest, and Delia dipped her head so that her hair halfway obscured her face.

"Well," she said. "H-have a good night."

"You, too," said Vanessa automatically, but backpedaled when Delia's shoulders tensed, "Take care of yourself."

"I can. I mean," Delia shook her head, "I will. I'll see you tomorrow."

 _Tomorrow?_ Vanessa thought, and nearly asked, but Delia's attention was already focused on her car, one unsteady hand jamming the key into the lock, the paint around which was already scratched from previous misfires. Always distracted? Always in a hurry to get away?

Vanessa knew the answer, but progress had been made tonight, and she didn't want to push her luck, didn't want to push Delia too far, too fast.

She turned and made as if to go back inside, but lingered a little ways back on the pavement to watch the other woman climb into the driver's seat. The car's engine was loud, with a muffler that in no way lived up to its name, and Delia behind the wheel was like Delia inside-out, with the Cougar making all the noise she never did, as though it were her means of expressing all the growls and roars that could never reach the surface.

It wasn't until the car had turned the corner at the end of the block that Vanessa went back inside, and it wasn't until she was already in bed early the next morning that she set her alarm clock for ten, because _tomorrow,_ Delia had said. Whether or not she'd meant it was beside the point; what mattered was that it suddenly felt like a possibility that hadn't been there before, and tomorrow -- _today_ \-- Vanessa decided, today she was going to put in the work.


	2. Chapter 2

"Good morning, Oliver," Delia greeted her favorite co-worker as she hung up her coat, then paused on her way across the waiting area to feed the fish. "Catch anything good on the telly last night?"

The shelter's resident tabby blatted conversationally, and Delia rubbed at his velvety nose with her thumb as she glanced at the security monitor behind the desk, its screen quartered into three views of the Storybrooke Pet Shelter and one of Animal Planet, which she always turned on for his benefit before she left for the evening. Dr. Thatcher thought it silly -- Oliver had plenty of friends in the back to keep him company, he said, and television was about as useful to a cat as bird seed -- but Delia knew otherwise, and reasoned that bird seed could prove extremely useful to a cat, perhaps not as a meal but certainly as a way of acquiring one.

Still, the vet didn't actually mind this little quirk of hers; the camera that particular section of screen was attached to would continue to record what it saw regardless of whether or not what it saw was displayed. He was a good sort, Frank Thatcher, but he was the kind of doctor who saw bodies that needed fixing, not patients with their own inner lives, no matter how comparatively humble their concerns.

That was where Delia came in. Officially she was a vet tech, performing simple procedures and assisting with more complex surgeries; unofficially, she was also a groomer, janitor, and desk jockey, but while she was good at all four, her real talent, her "gift," as Dr. Thatcher called it, was with the animals themselves. Aggressive dogs would roll over for Delia like puppies. The most nervous of cats would cease their struggles and remain obligingly still in her arms. "I speak their language," was the best she could explain it. She just knew how to read them -- knew how to tell between snarls of anger and those of fear, and when a purr was a plea for help and not an expression of contentment -- and in turn, she knew how to react to what they were expressing.

Indeed, Delia found animals to be eminently more relatable than people. She understood the raising of hackles to simulate greater substance against a stronger foe, and the private licking of wounds when that bluff was called; understood the difference between colors meant to attract and markings intended to repel, and what it was to walk that fine line between two types of survival: the necessity of camouflage and the desire to be known. It was why she amplified the already sharp angles of her face even on the days she didn't need to contour a swollen cheek, and why she smoked her eyes even when their only black-and-blue was that of her pupils and irises. It was why she pushed her breasts into padded bras and her feet into high- but sturdily-heeled boots, and strove to look just this side of "too much" to be off-putting -- to look as though she might leave a bad taste in the mouth of anyone who tried to bite her.

Her mind flashed back to Vanessa the night before, holding out her forgotten keys at a safe distance. Safe for whom, Delia wondered?

But Vanessa hadn't seemed particularly wary, even when Delia had, naturally, reacted to her courtesy like a stammering loon.

Why did she have to be such a ... such a _mess_ all the time? Completely incompetent at holding a casual conversation with another human being, forever smudged and tangled and covered in animal hair, always walking through the door smelling like a goddamn dog, as her husband was so fond of pointing out ... (She used to change her scrub top before going home, wash her arms and neck in the bathroom and dot perfume behind her ears, until Andrew had demanded to know why she'd come home smelling like a whore instead.)

But Vanessa had been so _nice,_ and that smile ... It was a terrible cliché, but Vanessa's was a smile that honestly did have the look of the sun beaming through dark cloud. Delia hadn't been able to get it out of her head for the rest of the night, that smile that seemed to have just broken out of prison.

And speaking of prisons ...

"Good morning, my darlings," she called to the room, clapping lightly before she reached for the red button that would open the larger dog cages en bloc. "Bull, Toughy, up and at 'em, time for walkies! Peg, Dachsie, Pedro, move those little legs!"

There was an excited kerfluffle as the dogs rushed her, to snuffle at her legs and receive a morning scritch. Boris the Borzoi was tall enough to prefer a proper hug, and Delia winced as he pushed excited paws into her torso, hitting a spot on her ribs that was still tender from a confrontation she'd had with the kitchen worktop at home two nights before.

Boris backed down with an apologetic whimper, and she knelt to give his neck a hearty rub with both hands.

"It's all right, darling. Not your fault."

She ushered the dogs out the door that led to the shelter's fenced back yard, then turned her attention to the few cats waiting to be taken to what she called the playroom. She plucked them free one by one, and Oliver wasted no time sticking his nose in each one's rear, as if they hadn't been cooped up all night the same as always and would actually have something new to tell him. Lucifer, an uncongenial tuxedo gib, older and bigger than Oliver, took offense, and took a warning swipe at Oliver's cheek.

"None of that this morning, please," Delia scolded them.

Everything was routine from there on out: the cats were fed, and then the dogs, and then Iago, the stroppy scarlet macaw whose favorite phrases gave at least one of his past owners away as having been either an Al Pacino enthusiast or a porn addict from Brooklyn. Kaa the ball python and Juju the grass snake were both good on baby mice and crickets for another week at least.

She freshened newspaper trays and litter pans while the coffee brewed. Phone messages were checked and noted, and the day's appointments looked over and prepared for. She let the dogs back in just before Dr. Thatcher arrived at 7:30, and gave them each a quick once-over with a brush to rid their fur of the excess of whatever they'd deemed fit to roll in, dead leaves being especially popular this time of year.

"Morning, Frank," she said, handing off a mug of Italian roast as the veterinarian shuffled drowsily past.

Dr. Thatcher yawned his way into a sip, then sighed in relief. "Delia, my dear, you are an angel amongst women. Tell me we have nothing scheduled until after lunch and I'm free to nap in my office?"

"We have nothing scheduled until after lunch and you are free to nap in your office."

"Wonderful."

"As long as you can perform a total hip arthroplasty on an Irish Wolfhound in your sleep."

"Oh, damn it, is that today?"

"Nine o'clock. Do try to keep up, darling."

Dr. Thatcher sighed and ran a hand over his face. "Ever have one of those days that feels like it's been so long in coming, it somehow manages to sneak up on you?"

Delia didn't have to think about her answer.

"No. I can't say that I have."

 

* * *

 

According to the miraculously functioning clock tower, it was 11:38 a.m. exactly when Vanessa stepped through the door of Granny's Diner, and for a moment she was taken aback at finding other than the usual faces within.

"Hey!" Ruby greeted her brightly. "You're up early today. Have a seat and your lobster roll'll be right out."

"Two rolls, actually," Vanessa corrected her, "and to go, this time. And, uh, one coffee, one ..." What would Delia like? She was English. Hot tea? No, that was stereotypical and possibly offensive. Vanessa compromised, "Iced tea."

"Ooh?" Ruby grinned, scenting scandal on the air. "What's the occasion? Got a hot breakfast date waiting back in your bed?"

Vanessa rolled her eyes. "I wish. Just eating a friend today. -- _With,_ eating _with._ Jesus." She shook her head and pressed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of her nose. "It's Monday," she explained, as if that was a valid excuse for someone who worked most weekends.

"Hey, believe me, I get it," the waitress laughed, ripping the order off her ticket pad. "Five minutes."

"Thanks, Ruby."

Five minutes' wait plus five minutes' walk later found Vanessa nervously loitering outside the Storybrooke Pet Shelter, drink carrier in one hand and brown paper bag of food in the other. Inside, the seat at the front desk was empty -- she hadn't been spotted; she could still back out.

 _Don't you dare,_ she told herself, mentally smacking away the incorporeal hand inching its way towards her throat.

Vanessa took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and pushed open the door.

A little shop bell sounded just above her head, and "With you in a minute!" Delia's voice called from the back.

Vanessa exhaled. The hard part was over, the band-aid ripped off. Now she had only to navigate the wound.

She looked around while she waited. The place was cute, for an animal shelter: modern, clean, cheerful but not in a kitschy, motivational-posters type of way, and there was a fish tank. Vanessa approved of fish tanks as a rule -- she'd started with a goldfish in a bowl at age four and now had a seventy-five gallon salt setup in her apartment -- but she'd always especially appreciated their presence in waiting rooms, finding them much easier to zone out to than stale magazines and Highlights with all of the puzzles solved by previous readers.

This one was freshwater, not very exciting in terms of fish, but bright and well-cared for, with real plants, a miniature riverboat wreck, and a small ceramic alligator at the bottom. Every so often, the alligator's mouth would open to emit a stream of bubbles, through which one of the guppies in particular seemed to delight in swimming.

"If you've found more keys, I promise you they're not mine this time."

Vanessa jerked up in surprise, and found Delia watching her curiously from just beyond the desk.

She tried to say hi and no at the same time, and came out with "Hoe," to which the other woman understandably frowned in confusion.

"Sorry?"

 _Oh my god, you fucking moron._ "No -- hello -- I mean, hello, and no, no keys this time." She made a conscious effort to grin through the heat flooding into her cheeks alongside an acute desire to drown herself in the fishtank. _Keep it together, Murdock. Salvage. Repair._ "I, uh, I did find lunch, though. Half of which _is_ yours."

Vanessa held up the bag and drinks, and Delia's look of confusion only deepened.

"You ... you bought me lunch?" the blonde asked.

"I did."

"Would it be terribly rude of me to ask why?"

_She thinks I'm a creep. She thinks I'm an overfamiliar, weird, pushy creep-woman._

"I'm not sure. To both questions. I just. I don't know. I wanted to have lunch with someone today, and I thought ... why not Delia? Because last night just kind of brought to my attention that even though we've known each other for years, we don't really know each other at all, and I ... want to. Know you. If that's all right with you."

Delia clasped her wrists with either hand, not quite folding her arms -- trying to keep her guard from going up, or just trying not to let slip that it already was?

"Well, I'm ... I'm flattered, but I'm afraid there's not much to know."

 _Don't overly protest. Shrug. Act casual. Pretend you're not weird._ "That's fine. The conversational dead weight will weigh less."

"Well, when you put it like that ..."

Vanessa hung her head and winced. "Okay, so we've established that I'll be having foot for lunch, but I got you a lobster roll. --Unless you're a vegetarian? I didn't even think -- you work with animals -- I can run back for a salad, if you want?"

"No, no," Delia quickly assured her, "I'm not. I know, I'm a really terrible person, but ..."

"Hey, no judgment from me. I'm the kind of person who'll talk to the lobster while we're both waiting for the pot to boil."

Delia looked horrified. "For heaven's sake, I don't go _that_ far!"

Vanessa's heart leapt into her throat, where it punched her in her back teeth for being an insensitive asshole.

 _CREEP,_ shouted her brain. _SOULLESS, BARBAROUS CREEP._

"Uh -- well, I-I don't, uh ..."

She was so flustered, it took her a moment to parse the meaning of the small, devilish smile that had appeared on Delia's face.

"Gotcha," said the other woman, and "Oh my god," Vanessa exhaled, shoulders sagging in relief. "You're right: you are a really terrible person."

Laughing, Delia covered her face with her hands. "I know, I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. But I hope that revelation doesn't take lunch off the menu?"

"Hell no, it doesn't," Vanessa assured her. "You just got penciled in for tomorrow, too."

"Oh!" Was Delia blushing? "Well. Brilliant." She was absolutely blushing. And it was adorable. "As long as you don't mind eating here? It's just that I've a post-op patient I need to keep an eye on."

"Here's fine. Here's perfect."

"Okay. Um." She nodded toward the back of the shelter. "Follow me, then."

 

* * *

 

 **De Vil's Bayou, Maldonia, Fairy Tale Land  
** _A Few Years Before the Curse_

 

The frogs and cicadas did not go silent at just any emergence of predatory eyes from the surface of the water. Indeed, there was very little they deemed worthy of interrupting their nightly orchestrations, but the woman -- if she could be called a woman -- was, without being very little herself, one of these things.

Sable eyes searched the banks, searched the bog moss in the trees silhouetted against the deep blue of the sky at dusk. She reached out with her magic, and felt the faint pull of where the current, nearly stagnant here, would lead her.

She was close -- less than a league away.

She was close, and _he_ had been here.

She tried to imagine him carefully picking her way between the mangrove roots, hemmed in by swamp grass and silt. It would be slow, frustrating progress even for a dinghy, and made even more so by the characteristic closeness of the bayou -- the static, humid air thick with clouds of insects, and the underwater vegetation that groped and clung like drowning men to the bellies and edges of boats that would leave them behind -- and that was saying nothing of the sentient dangers, of the venomous black snakes that swam past in inky ribbons, or the marsh dragons that lined the shores and stood sentinel in the water, still as logs, until softer somethings crept close enough to be scuppered.

One of them, a big female, hissed at her as she passed.

Ursula rose up on her tentacles, lifting her torso out of the water, and hissed back.

The alligator subsided, and Ursula rounded the final bend.

_There._

The house, if it could be called a house, stood atop a modest embankment just beyond a thicket of trees. As a structure, it was a mixed breed, feisty and feral, looking as though someone had stitched together a castle and a riverboat. The writing above a filigreed and halfway-rusted wrought iron gate, much strangled by wild figs, named the place Hell Hall between its greenery.

Ursula emerged from the water on two legs, the wet and the algae slipping hydrophobic off her body and newly-conjured gown with a curl of her fingers. Countless eyes reflecting red and green in the low light warily charted her progress past the gate and along the property's private road towards the house.

In the turnaround rested a black-and-white carriage in the Maldonian style, long and wide-wheeled to better navigate both sandy main roads and mucky byways. It was extraordinarily clean, which wasn't particularly surprising, considering that the reputation of its owner as an eccentric recluse was perhaps even more widespread than that of her standing as a passably powerful witch. Bought for show, most likely.

Aside from the animals, the house seemed to be unguarded. Arrogance? Apathy?

Ursula felt neither reason good enough to warrant knocking. With the strength of a single tentacle, she pushed open the castle-side doors, and went inside.

The foyer had been done up in what Ursula would have called a belly-of-the-whale theme, all red marble flooring, flocked wallpaper and white columns, and a lolling tongue of a grand staircase carpeted in the same deep pink as the heavy velvet curtains drawn against the jambs of every window and doorway. Even the air tasted, for lack of a better word, _gaudy_ \-- a blend of dust and cosmetic powder, dried flowers and ... ambergris?

" _Two_ trespassers in as many months?" a voice rang out from the upper level of the hall, and Ursula looked up as a woman, flanked by two powerful black-and-tan dogs, emerged from the shadows at the top of the staircase. She had prominent cheekbones that were heavily powdered, lips that were heavily rouged, and her hair was split down the middle, half of it black and the other half white. She wore a long, narrow black gown, and over it, in defiance of the oppressive heat, a massive, cream-colored fur coat.

"I thought I ordered the alligators to _eat_ every interloping human who attempts to set foot on my property?"

The dogs snarled, as if they'd understood her every word.

"You were too specific," said Ursula.

"Do tell."

She unfurled two tentacles from beneath one peplummed hip, and spread her arms in a there-you-are fashion.

"I'm not human."

The woman looked her thoughtfully up and down, running her tongue along the edges of her teeth.

"... Hunh," she decided after a moment, then sauntered -- swayed -- down the stairs and toward a decanter-laden sideboard a short distance from the main doors. "Fancy a drink, darling?"

"No, thank you."

The woman scoffed as she filled two short tumblers halfway with clear liquor. "Oh, god, don't tell me you're one of those insufferable bores who feels they need to stay sharp whilst conducting official business?"

"You don't have my drink."

Eyebrows drawn thick with greasepaint lifted at the challenge. "I have everyone's drink."

"I'd prefer this not take any longer than necessary."

"And who are you to say what's necessary of this encounter? Or how long it should take?"

"I am Ursula."

The woman's eyes lit up. They were as blue as the base of a flame.

"The sea witch!" she hissed.

"Sea _queen._ "

A gloved hand waved the correction away. "Tomayto, tomahto. I assume, since you're here, you're aware of who _I_ am, or is it oceanic custom to enter uninvited the homes of random strangers in kingdoms that are not yours?"

"You are the Skinner. _La Fourreuse._ Cruella de Vil."

"Well, at least you've bothered to revise. So, what brings the infamous ruler of all the ocean to my sultry little corner of the world?"

She held out the second drink, and Ursula had the distinct feeling that it was in her best interests to play along and humor this woman, if she wanted to get anywhere. She took the glass, but didn't lift it to her lips.

"I understand you recently enjoyed the patronage of someone I'm interested in locating."

Cruella stared at her evenly. "Did I," she said.

Ursula took the hint, took a sip -- and immediately wished she hadn't. She struggled to swallow past a burn that seemed to stick in her throat like a very tenacious, very angry jellyfish, and the grimace that twisted her face in its wake was as uncontrollable as the full-body shudder that accompanied it.

"What in Hades _is_ that?" she coughed out, blinking the tears from her eyes and exhaling carefully through the backdraft of heat that shot up her gullet.

"Mother's milk." Cruella smirked. "Just a little something I brew up in the bath. It's taken me ages to get the recipe right."

"This is what it's _supposed_ to taste like?"

"If it does its job properly, you shouldn't be able to taste anything at all after two or three more."

Figuring it best to get these ill-named pleasantries out of the way as quickly as possible, Ursula braced herself, held her breath, and threw back the last of the shot. She swallowed convulsively, grimaced and shuddered again.

" _Hook,_ " she said hoarsely, slamming the empty glass down on the sideboard with slightly more force than she'd intended. "I know he was here. What did he want, and where was he going with it?"

Cruella tilted her head and smiled. "Come, darling, let's sit in the parlor if we're to discuss the particulars. Much cozier there."

To Ursula's dismay, she refilled the sea witch's glass and topped off her own before leading the way to the boat side of the house, to an expansive room complete with roaring fire and abundant leather upholstery, fur-trimmed throw pillows and various species of rug.

Ursula settled herself on a soft striped chaise, and her hostess handed back her glass in passing as she slouched onto the love seat opposite, with the dogs resuming their sentry positions beside her.

Cruella took a drink, throat working with the same smoothness with which it would have handled water.

"Now then," she began, "what could a bilgy, unctuous rake of a pirate have done that the sea queen herself feels compelled to personally pursue him?"

"That's my business."

"And what I gave him is mine."

"What do you want? Seal skins? Sunken treasure? A pet shark?"

"Ooh, a shark _would_ be intriguing ... ugh, but keeping it would be such a nuisance." She nodded at the glass in Ursula's hand. "Drink your drink, darling, let's don't be rude."

"I'd rather not, if it's all the same to you."

Cruella sighed. "It is _not_ all the same to me, and _I'd_ rather have a guest worth entertaining. God, you're all the same: _Give me this, tell me that, make it stop, let me die._ The same old demands, day in, day out. One would think the dread goddess of the abyss would be at least a little sympathetic to how tiresome that becomes, but no, _I_ get to make the acquaintance of the one deity with zero regard for conversational nuance. --Do I have that right, a deity? Or are you more of a demiurge? Popular opinion's always been vexingly divided on the issue."

Ursula weighed the possibility of choking the answers out of her, but she didn't drink often -- past decisions made whilst under the influence having proven less than stellar -- and her first one was already going to work, making her feel warm and heavy and disinclined to waste the effort.

"You have it right," she said, then raised a doubting eyebrow. "That's all you want? Conversation?"

"For the moment."

As so often happened in Ursula's head, her thoughts arrived at a destination seemingly all at once, and without any conscious observation of the journey they must have taken to get there. Mermaid's intuition, according to her father; her mother had called it queenly instinct.

"You're lonely," she stated.

Cruella's balk was subtle -- perhaps a fraction of a second in which her expression went conspicuously blank before her lackadaisical composure resumed itself -- but it had definitely been there.

Even so, "No, darling," she argued, "I'm _bored._ As would you be, if you were trapped in this ... this fetid little backwater!"

"Trapped?"

Cruella shrugged. "Figure of speech."

"Then what's keeping you here, if you hate it so much? Can't find someone to feed the dogs while you're gone?"

"I don't _hate_ it. I was born here. This bayou, such as it is, is my birthright."

"Family tradition, then?"

"Something like that."

"Such things are overrated, in my experience."

Cruella smiled, none too kindly. "So I've heard. The little mermaid who wrenched not only herself free from her father's tyrannical grip, but took his entire kingdom with her when she did. Bravo, darling, I must say."

Ursula graciously bowed her head.

"Granted," she said, "I didn't inherit any bayous, but one can't have everything."

Cruella's eyes flashed at the barb, bright and cold as diamonds.

"Quite. Still, I'm sure you get by."

"I manage." Ursula took another cautious sip of Cruella's acrid bathtub concoction, and found that the other woman was right -- the more she drank, the easier it was going down. "And you?" she asked. "Is this fetid little backwater enough to satisfy you?"

"At times."

"And at others?"

Cruella looked contemplatively askance. She polished off the rest of her drink, licked her lips, and had out with it at last: "I need you to help me locate something."

Ursula feigned surprise. "Thus marks our segue from conversation to negotiation?"

"Just so."

"And what, pray tell, needs finding?"

Cruella stood, as did the dogs. She went over to the fireplace and retrieved a tarnished key from a decorative box on the mantle.

"Stay, darlings," she said to the pups; and then, to Ursula, "Come with me."

 

* * *

 

 

"So what's your story?" Vanessa asked. "Where are you from?"

Shelter Delia, she was quickly learning, was a much more comfortable, playful, and talkative creature on her own turf than was Bar Delia. It had Vanessa not minding in the least that they ate in the middle of a forest of cat trees and with a young marmalade tabby seated primly between them, hoping for a share of their meal.

Delia finished chewing a bite of sandwich, swallowed, and washed it down with a sip of tea.

"Suffolk, originally, and then London, for boarding school, and then New York, and now here." She shrugged. "Have you always lived in Storybrooke?"

Vanessa shook her head. "No, I left home the second I turned eighteen."

"And where was home?"

Vanessa smiled wryly. "Weeki Wachee, Florida."

Delia's eyes widened, agoggle at this disclosure. "You threw over Florida for _Maine?_ Forgive me, darling, but that's like choosing the Falklands over the Bahamas."

Vanessa laughed. "My first winter here was a learning experience, to say the least. You don't really take seasons into consideration if you've never had them before, and at the time I was more concerned with getting as far away from my father as was geographically and financially possible."

"Bit of a maggot, was he?"

Vanessa hesitated, the bait wriggling on the line. She wasn't closeted, per se, but the last time she had come out to someone ...

When _had_ she last come out to someone? All she could remember was her father's face, stern with disappointment and betrayal, and the terrible, terrible silence that had filled their home while Vanessa saved every penny she could from her part-time job, and Ulysses Murdock waited out the final months of his "legal obligation to house and feed" his daughter.

"Bit of a bigot," she admitted, toeing the confessional line, "if that's the same thing."

"Close enough," said Delia. "Oh, but I'd love to go to Florida someday! Or the Bahamas, come to that. Anyplace _warm._ I feel like I've spent my whole life halfway frozen."

"Why did you end up in Maine, then? It's not like the U.S. doesn't offer a wider variety of climates than the U.K."

For the first time since they'd sat down, Delia's smile barely reached her cheekbones, let alone her eyes.

"To be honest, I'd come to the States with this vague ambition that I'd try to make it in New York -- make what, I haven't the foggiest idea, but whatever it was, I knew I didn't want it to happen in England."

"Wow. I skipped a state, you skipped a whole country."

"Well, in my defense, this state is nearly the size of my country."

Vanessa raised her cup in assent. "Touché."

"Anyway, against all odds, I did actually manage to eke out an existence odd-jobbing it under the table, and every three months I'd leave and re-enter the country to avoid the hassle of a visa. And while I've never been the financial gods' favorite person, they seemed to especially have it in for me my ninth month in the city, and I was left with two choices: I could either make rent and hitchhike to Canada, or take a bus there and have no flat to come back to. So I chose rent and hitchhike."

Vanessa's eyes were wide with horrified admiration. "My god. I was scared half to death just driving up here by myself; I can't imagine having to make the trip with a different stranger every fifty miles."

"The trick," said Delia, sucking a gloss of butter off the pad of her thumb, "is to get in the mindset that you're the escaped mental patient ax murderer all those strangers are secretly terrified of picking up. And then, on the outskirts of Boston, one of those strangers ended up being Andrew. Needless to say, I never made it to Canada, or back to New York."

"He swept you off your feet?"

"Mm. Sort of. But how difficult is a nineteen-year-old girl to impress? He was older, handsome, charming ... he ticked all the boxes in the grand list of things that girls are bred to fall for. And when he suggested we get married, I thought, you know, how much better could I honestly expect to do?"

"But you didn't love him."

Delia shrugged. "I honestly can't remember. More often than not, it feels like we just sort of ... phased into one another's lives. I know it sounds crazy, but sometimes I feel as though I just woke up one morning and there he was. Like a twenty-years-long one night stand. Quite pathetic, really."

Vanessa shook her head. "No, what's pathetic is older men who go after young girls because women their own age have learned how to see the slime trail they leave behind everywhere they go."

Delia nodded absently as she swirled her straw around in her tea.

"Sticky," she said, "those slime trails."

Vanessa licked her lips, and swallowed down the fingers creeping up her throat at what she was about to ask.

"Are you stuck, Delia?"

Delia blew out a breath that ended in a laugh too weak to be genuine.

"Stuck, please. What wife isn't?"

Vanessa's hand twitched with the urge to cover the other woman's, but she resisted the impulse.

"You know what I mean," she said softly. "Don't you?"

Delia met her eyes, her own flickering as panic passed across her face like the light of an oncoming train.

She took a drink of her tea and wiped her hands on a paper napkin with fumbling, hasty movements.

"I, ah ... I should go check on Chief and let the others back in. Back in a moment."

Vanessa let her go, and cleaned up their things while she was gone. Had she fucked up, she wondered? Broached the subject too soon?

She looked down at the tabby, who stared back at her with, if not encouragement, then at least a lack of accusation.

She passed him a bit of lobster that had escaped one of the rolls.

"Put in a good word for me, eh?"

The cat's reply, upon finishing its snack, was to studiously bathe one of its paws. Vanessa hoped that was feline for yes.

She heard Delia's voice calling and whistling at the back door, and then the clatter of claws on tile; when, after another minute, Delia still hadn't returned, Vanessa followed the sounds to their source.

"Delia," she said.

Delia stiffened where she knelt next to a large cage, inside of which was an equally large, unconscious, partially shaved but otherwise wirehaired gray dog.

"Yes, darling?" she asked, the tone of her voice strung tight between lighthearted and strained.

"Is it ... is it still okay if I come tomorrow?"

Delia was quiet for long enough that Vanessa grew certain her answer would be no.

"... I'd like that," she finally agreed, and looked as if she'd startled herself by the admission.

"Good," said Vanessa. "Me, too."

 

* * *

 

 

By the light of an oil lamp they made their way to the castle side of the house, up the grand staircase, down a hall lined with peeling wallpaper and closed doors, and up another smaller, winding staircase. The higher and deeper into the house they went, the mustier the air became, smelling of mold and mildew, old wood and dust; the higher and deeper they went, the whiter Cruella's knuckles grew around the fisted key.

Cruella hesitated before a narrow door at the end of one final hallway that, judging by the dust and cobwebs, was much less visited than some of the others. She jammed the key into its lock quickly, probably hoping Ursula wouldn't notice the way her hand shook as she did.

Ursula noticed anyway.

Hinges shrieked in protest as the door swung slowly open, as if loath itself to reveal yet another set of stairs, small in number but deadly steep.

The attic.

Cruella said nothing, but took a visibly unsteady breath as they began to climb.

The lamplight seemed especially feeble up here, pushing weakly against a darkness that was thicker than ordinary. It made Ursula dizzy, feeling as though she were ascending into the pressurized depths of an underwater trench.

Cruella picked her way through dress forms and sheet-covered furniture, adroitly sidestepping all obstacles despite her inebriated state. Ursula, unfamiliar with the layout of the room, was also less successful at avoiding its traps and stumbling blocks, and pitched forward into Cruella's back when she dashed her knee against an ancient trunk whilst weaving to avoid an empty hanging birdcage.

"Do you have eight _left_ feet, darling?" Cruella sneered, her voice louder than necessary.

Ursula felt her face heat in embarrassment.

"Six, actually," she snapped back. "And you can judge after we've seen how well you do underwater with two."

In a far corner, Ursula could see a narrow bed, unmade but obviously unslept in for many years. She looked at Cruella, who seemed to be avoiding looking in that direction altogether.

A cloud of dust billowed up as Cruella ripped a nearby sheet off with a flourish, revealing a painting underneath -- more specifically, a standing portrait of a woman with red hair and green eyes, and two spotted dogs seated at her either side. She wore a floor-length red gown, and nestled above its décolletage was a massive diamond solitaire pendant.

"My mother," said Cruella, gesturing with a careless mixture of grandiosity and apathy. "Medusa de Vil. The Mad Madam of Maldonia."

Ursula squinted at the woman's face. Her nose and jawline were different from Cruella's, and her cheekbones not quite so severe, but there was a shared lankiness, and a similar smirk about the mouth.

"You must favor your father," she said.

Cruella tilted her head. "Funny you should say that." She nodded at the portrait. "That diamond. The Devil's Eye. My father gave it to her, and she never, ever took it off, not even to sleep or bathe. He disappeared, you see, before I was even born."

"How tragic," said Ursula flatly.

"Not as tragic as the manner in which she died. She was out exercising the dogs one day, and ventured too far into the swamp. There'd been a drought recently; the alligators were hungry."

Ursula raised an eyebrow.

"I found the one that did it," Cruella went on. "Cut him open. Found a few bits of darling Mother, but no diamond. A stone that size, he either sicked it up not long after eating her, or its chain was broken in the struggle, and he never got hold of it to begin with. It's still out there, and I need _you,_ " she pointed a finger at Ursula's chest, "to find it for me."

Ursula leveled an incredulous look her way. "You want me to comb however many acres of bayou to find a rock the size of a sea urchin?"

"You did offer a payment of sunken treasure, did you not? I don't recall you saying I couldn't choose which one. And anyway, you won't have to comb acres -- I know more or less where to look, but the water's risen since then. I can't get to it myself."

"So get one of your pets to fetch it for you."

Ursula's hostess scoffed. "I'm not an idiot, of course I've tried that already! It's enchanted, you see. The animals can't find it. You could."

"How can you be sure?"

Cruella shrugged one bony shoulder, coat slipping down her bare arm. "Call it an inkling."

"You don't look like you're wanting for jewelry," Ursula pointed out. "What's so special about this necklace?"

"Well, it's an heirloom, isn't it? Like this folly of a house," said Cruella, gesturing at their surroundings. "What's so special about what _you're_ after?"

"... Fine," Ursula conceded. "I'll look for your rock -- for _one day._ After that, regardless of whether or not I find it, you will tell me what I want to know. I think that's a fair exchange of abilities."

Cruella tilted her chin up, pleased, and extended a hand. "Agreed."

Ursula looped a tentacle twice around Cruella's wrist -- so slender, so breakable -- and squeezed.


	3. Chapter 3

_Like that dog in the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons,_ Delia thought, boots thudding hollow on the steps that led up to the trailer's front door. _Like that dog ..._

It was a mantra that hooked into her head every time she pulled into the portion of exposed foundation slab that Firefly Hill Estates proudly termed a private driveway, hooked in and seemed to buoy her mind away from the leaden feel of her footfalls as she approached her little eighteen-by-ninety piece of the American Dream, $700 a month of peeling sepia paint and the poor man's picket fence, white lattice skirting.

_Like that dog in the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons ..._

She held the screen ajar with her hip as she unlocked the door, as per usual missing the keyhole on her first try.

"Oh, good, the lady of the house has finally seen fit to grace us with her presence."

Delia didn't look at him as she hung up her bag on a hook by the door, didn't look at him until the distinctive shuck of a racking shotgun slide ripped through the numbness that had sealed off her brain like shrinkwrap, and she found herself staring into the cyclopean black eye of a twelve-gauge muzzle.

"Where the fuck have you been?"

The shrill ringing in her ears fringed his words with the metallic shash of a blade being sharpened against a whetstone.

_That dog ..._

"Car wouldn't start," she explained, her voice distant to her own ears, a hollow itch in her throat. "I had to ring the garage for a jump."

" _Ring_ the _gair_ -idge," mocked her husband in a high voice. He rolled his eyes and lowered the gun. "Jesus, relax, it ain't loaded. I can't believe you fall for that every goddamn time."

The black-rimmed tunnel to which her vision had shrunk finally expanded to reveal the cans of solvent and oil sitting on the coffee table, the dirty rag in his right hand.

Of course. Of course. Hunting season was just around the corner. Idiot.

"What's for dinner?" Andrew demanded. "I'm starved."

Dinner. She'd been dwelling on lunch all day. Even now, a glance in the refrigerator brought her back to Vanessa peering through the glass of the shelter's fish tank. Delia had waited a full thirty seconds before she'd made her presence known, taking the opportunity to just ... look at her. She was so beautiful; the antithesis of Delia in every way. Dark where Delia was pale, marvelously curvaceous where Delia was all angles. She was the elegant restraint to Delia's garish exaggeration; if Delia tried too hard, then Vanessa didn't have to try at all.

It was a quality that should have made her envious, and it did, but there was fascination there, too, and admiration, and--

"Hello? _Earth to Delia._ " Thick fingers snapped in front of her face. "Do you need to go back to the _gair_ -idge to get your fucking brain jumped?"

"Pasta," said Delia, blinking back to reality. "There's still some meat sauce left."

" _Paa_ -sta," parroted Andrew, drawing out the initial vowel through his sinuses. "Well, get on with it. I told Whale I'd meet him at the bar at seven."

Delia tensed. "You're going to the bar?" She remembered, at the last instant, to make the inquiry sound upbeat at the end, more curious than cautious. Did Vanessa work Mondays? She wasn't sure. Last week, last year ... all of her own days blurred together; trying to pinpoint the details of anyone else's was hopeless.

"Yes, I am going to the bar," Andrew repeated, deliberately enunciating each word. "The hell's wrong with you today, those mutts finally give you ear mites?"

Delia shook her head. "Sorry. Fifteen minutes, darling."

He didn't ask if she wanted to go -- or inform her, with an order after dinner to get in the damn truck, that she would be going regardless of her opinion on the matter -- and Delia couldn't tell if she was disappointed or relieved by the slight. She wanted very much to see Vanessa again, but it would be impossible with him.

She could picture it all in her head: Vanessa would say hello -- would try, most likely, to say more -- and then after she left, Andrew would ask Delia why. Ask how long they'd been friends, what did they talk about, where was Delia managing to find the time for such a bustling social life in between work and her wifely duties of keeping house -- oh, right, silly him, the house looked like shit, _that's_ where she was finding the time.

And then he would get angry -- not right away, but later, his grip hard on her thigh as she drove them home, hard on her upper arm -- or her hair, if she struggled -- as he hauled her up the stairs and inside and then ...

... and then tomorrow, Delia would have had to look Vanessa in the eye and tell her not to come round anymore. Would have to be mean about it to make it stick, mean enough to never see that smile cast in her direction again.

No. No, it was better this way. Better to sink low in the long grass and hide than risk the exposure a flight could bring -- it was a series of flights, after all, that had got her into this mess in the first place.

The screen door banged shut as Andrew left, followed shortly by the rattling, mechanical cough that accompanied the turning over of the Dodge's ignition -- the same SUV in which he'd first picked her up, all those years ago. It was one of Delia's favorite sounds now, that of its engine leaving her behind.

She breathed a sigh of relief and cracked her neck, pressed the tension out of her temples with her fingertips before she cleared the dirty dishes from the kitchen table and filled the sink with soapy water. The whole trailer felt larger in Andrew's absence, almost livable. Even the glass eyes of his hunting trophies that lined the walls seemed to become less ... accusatory. Some even looked almost sympathetic, as if they were aware that the only thing separating their position and hers was the liminal space of metaphor.

Delia wondered if her husband ever fantasized about adding her own head to his collection -- if he ever heard her doing laundry just outside his workroom door, and thought about inviting her inside, for the first and last time ...

She shook the macabre thought out of her head as she mechanically scoured the burnt bottom of a saucepan. Andrew was a bastard, but a meticulous one. He knew the woods nearly as well as Sheriff Graham; if he wanted his wife dead, she would be food scattered wide for the wolves, not mounted between a pheasant and a doe and displayed as a coffee table conversation piece.

Conversation.

Delia paused mid-scrub.

What if Vanessa confronted Andrew in Delia's absence? What would she say about what she knew, or thought she knew? Would she think she could blackmail him into behaving?

" _Shit,_ " Delia hissed under her breath. Why had she said anything herself? She should have laughed it off more resolutely, should have lied through her goddamn _teeth_ ...

But she'd never had to lie, not about him, because no one had ever asked before; no one had ever ... _noticed._ Or wanted to notice. Not Dr. Thatcher. Not even Sheriff Graham, when he came round the shelter to volunteer. And Delia preferred it that way.

Didn't she?

So many years of eyes sliding over her as if she herself were an oily thing, a slippery film to be blinked away from the surface of one's vision, and suddenly Vanessa had _seen_ her -- _Vanessa_ had seen her -- and Delia had no idea what that meant, not why it had happened or what it might deliver, or even how it made her feel.

Stunned. Hysterical. Terrified, soothed, ashamed. _Hopeful._

A hundred and one feelings rising like welts on the skin of her consciousness, each clamoring to be scratched, each too tender to touch. In the span of less than an hour, Vanessa had become a cracked-open window in a burning house: a breath of fresh air that could either feed the fire, or keep Delia from succumbing to the smoke.

She shook her head. Vanessa wouldn't say anything. She _wouldn't._ She wasn't that stupid -- she wasn't, as far as Delia could tell, stupid at all, aside from her demonstrably terrible taste in new friends -- unless this was a pity thing? A poor-battered-woman-needs-rescuing, civic duty thing?

No. Vanessa wasn't like Mary Margaret, precious humanitarian Mary Margaret, hocking those damned church candles every year ... at least, it didn't feel like she was operating on that frequency. Delia couldn't exactly place why she wanted to trust Vanessa -- by all accounts, her instincts had never led her anything but astray -- but doubting her felt wrong in a way she had never quite experienced before. Perhaps it was simply that she hadn't had a real friend in so long, not since ... well, that hadn't exactly been friendship, and how real it had been was, in hindsight, debatable.

But this, she felt, could be different -- better. Delia wouldn't make the same mistake twice. She would be careful. The occasional lunch, and nothing more. Vanessa would be her treat, her special treat. She was entitled to that much, wasn't she? She'd sat and stayed and rolled over and played dead long enough to earn at least that much. She could stretch her tether, just a bit, if she approached her rope limit piecemeal -- if she didn't run hell for leather only to be noosed back into her yard, like that dog.

_Like that dog in the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons._

 

* * *

 

When Ursula woke, her mouth tasted like the harbor of a seaside city after a heavy rain, and she was reasonably certain that her brain had, at some point during the night, become bottled like a model ship, corked tight, and been shaken vigorously until all that remained was sailcloth and splinters. She felt _desiccated,_ thirsty as a beached porpoise on a hot summer's day, weak and nauseous and like all eight of her limbs had been replaced with inanimate rubber outgrowths.

She groaned and shifted on the bed, tentacles receding like those of a slumbering sea anemone. To her left, she heard something thump to the floor and clack away at a middling pace. Her chaperone, she supposed. Or her guard.

Gathering her fortitude, Ursula pushed herself up to sit back against the headboard, breathing carefully through her nose against the choppy feeling in her stomach that accompanied movement. That much accomplished, she pressed a palm to her forehead with the vague notion that it would keep her face from sliding off her skull, and tried her eyes.

The light coming into the room was a mid-morning yellow, painfully bright, and illuminating unfamiliar surroundings: a maenad's monochromatic dream of a boudoir, black and white and dead all over with the pelts of animals both rare and commonplace. Even the bedclothes were of sumptuous, creamy furs so finely stitched as to appear seamless, immeasurably soft against Ursula's tentacles and the bare skin of her arms and back.

"Oh, at last," Cruella rasped from the door, dogs at her sides. She wore a sheer black floor-length peignoir trimmed in fluffy white marabou, and carried in her hands an empty glass and, to Ursula's dismay, a crystal pitcher full of not-even-the-gods-knew-what. "I feel as though I've aged a decade waiting for you to wake up."

Ursula grit her teeth and scowled to the best of her current ability.

"You could have saved us both the inconvenience if you hadn't insisted on pouring that ... that _vitriol_ down my throat last night," she groused.

"I _beg_ your pardon!" Cruella balked. "I poured nothing down your throat; all I did was encourage you to pour something down your own -- which took all of two minutes to accomplish, I might add. Anyway, here."

Ursula's hostess filled the glass with a pulpy pink mystery drink, then set down the pitcher on the bedside table, and sat herself on the edge of the bed. The dogs, too, made themselves comfortable, one jumping up to lie at the cecaelian's feet, the other resuming its place to her left.

Their owner offered the glass to Ursula, who shook her head.

"Oh, no. I'm not ingesting anything else that comes on your recommendation."

Cruella clicked her tongue impatiently and rolled her eyes. "It's _juice,_ darling. Unadulterated, unfermented grapefruit juice. It helps with the, ah ..." She waved a hand in the general vicinity of her head. "... reconstitutioning."

Ursula took the glass, her expression doubtful, and sniffed its contents. Some kind of citrus? She'd had lemons before, pillaged from human ships, and enjoyed them.

She took a tentative sip, and then another, after the first showed signs of successfully dousing the sour heat in her stomach.

"It's bitter," she observed.

"The best things always are."

"Agreed."

Already, Ursula could hear the lofty _just so_ implied in the slight lifting of painted eyebrows at the concurrence. Thus satisfied, Cruella stood and sauntered over to a vanity peppered with powderpuffs and perfume bottles, where she scrutinized her reflection in a looking-glass with neither pleasure nor disdain.

She skirted the edge of her bottom lip with her right ring finger, repairing an invisible flaw in its rouge. Ursula wondered if she went to bed like that, fully made up -- and with that thought it finally dawned on her where, precisely, in Cruella's home she must be.

"This is your room," she said.

"It's my house, darling," Cruella drawled. "They're all my rooms."

Ursula recalled the attic, recalled its narrow, dusty bed. She remembered the dozens of doors they had passed to get there, all of them closed.

"You know very well what I meant."

It wasn't out of the ordinary for a host to relinquish their private chambers to a guest of superior status, if no others were available, but Ursula couldn't fathom the notion that Cruella viewed her as anything more than an equal at best. She certainly hadn't deferred to the sea witch in any other respect as yet.

Still, Cruella shrugged, feigning puzzlement that her visitor should be at all surprised by her adherence to societal convention. "Would you rather have slept on the chaise?"

"Of course not--"

"Then don't complain."

"I'm not _complaining--_ "

"Good. Ingratitude in a guest is so unbecoming."

"As is condescension in a host!" Ursula snapped.

" _You're welcome,_ " Cruella said pleasantly, throwing her voice across the bed as though the mattress were a river that needed bridging, and Ursula was about to respond in kind, could feel her tentacles flaring with indignation that this ... this _peasant,_ this _human_ even _dared_ ...

... until she noticed the way Cruella's mouth tucked up at the corners, and the way her eyes glittered with delight.

If there was any proverb pounded into the heads of the undersea population since birth, it was not to take the bait -- especially bait dangled by the bipedal -- and so she bit her tongue instead, and let the moment protract into prickly silence.

Unfortunately, this meant she could pinpoint the instant _silence_ shifted a step to the left and switched places with its ostensibly similar-sounding but much more awkward cousin, _disquiet,_ when their eyes met in such a way that they both seemed to notice the undue intimacy of the scene at the same time: Ursula in Cruella's own bed, still tucked between her fluffy white sheets, and Cruella herself negligibly clad, the thin silk of her peignoir turned all but transparent by the light of the window behind her.

According to Atlantican legend, human legs were a curse: the result of a melusine who'd breached the surface one too many times, fallen asleep on the shore, and had awakened to find that her fins had shriveled into feet, and that the twin tails to which they were attached had likewise been dried by the harsh sunlight into two stiff, ungainly limbs. Thence unable to swim deeply enough to rejoin her people, she was forced to walk upright on land, as the lesser animals do, for the rest of her days. It was a bedtime story all merfolk imprinted upon their children to discourage them from tarrying too near the beach, lest a low tide turn them into unwitting exiles, and it was the memory of that very threat that compelled most who were of age to take part in the annual Onshore Promenade to err on the side of caution, and be safely submerged by sunset.

Ursula had to admit, though, that for a feature ranking amongst her people as something of a farcical deformity, the silhouette of Cruella's legs beneath her peignoir, long and slender and subtly sinuous, was rather -- almost -- a little bit ... morbidly enticing.

Ursula muzzled the thought before it could express itself further. She wasn't here for that, and more importantly, she didn't sleep with humans -- especially bossy, arrogant, alcoholic humans with fur fetishes and decorating schemes that suggested a staggering degree of colorblindness.

She would look for the damned diamond, demand her payment, and resume her journey before the sun sank again into the sea.

"So do you eat as well as drink," she asked, "or will I be expected to catch my own breakfast?"

"I eat," said Cruella. "But I don't serve. --Well, _food._ " She returned to the bed and leant nearly over Ursula to tug at a fox tail bell pull above the headboard. The scent of magnolia blossoms, waxy and bright, drifted in her wake when she pulled away.

Ursula sipped her grapefruit juice, and washed their sweetness from her senses with its sour.

 

* * *

 

"Ice cream?" Delia asked. "In forty degree weather?"

It was Thursday, their fourth da-- their fourth lunch together, and Vanessa had just suggested a change of scenery in the form of Any Given Sundae.

"It's supposed to help, actually. Something about the body having to work harder to digest cold things, and that ends up raising your core temperature."

"No offense, darling, but that sounds like a load of tripe. A banana split is not a substitute for a fur coat."

Vanessa shrugged. "If you'd rather get something hot, that's fine with me."

"Oh no you don't," said Delia, retrieving her coat from the rack. "You can't just throw implausible trivia around willy-nilly and expect it to go untested. Ice cream it is, but we're taking my car -- I don't want to be twice as cold on the walk back if it doesn't work." She pulled a black-and-white striped beanie down over her ears with an air of finality Vanessa found welcomely haughty.

The Cougar smelled of cigarette smoke and old leather beneath a double layer of tree-shaped air fresheners dangling from the rearview mirror -- one vanilla and one lemon that in combination reminded Vanessa of the magnolia blossoms whose scent would haze the air every summer in her hometown. The car's front seat covers were zebra faux, and when Delia twisted the key in the ignition, a wall of vintage rock'n'roll came blaring out of the tinny speakers like a small British Invasion unto itself.

"Sorry!" said Delia, quickly lowering the volume. "I always forget how loud I leave the sound up."

"No, don't apologize," said Vanessa. "It's the Rolling Stones; it should be loud."

Delia looked pleasantly surprised. "You like the Stones?"

"I like pretty much anything with a discernible melody. Turn that shit back up, it's good."

Delia grinned, did as instructed, and pulled out into the street while Pilate washed his hands and sealed his fate.

"I think it's Gold," said Vanessa, gesturing with her chin at the local pawnbroker and antiquities dealer as he crossed the street in front of them at a stop light.

"Think what's Gold?" asked Delia.

"The name Mick Jagger hopes we can guess."

"Aha."

They followed his hitching steps until he reached the corner, at which point he turned, as though their eyes had tapped him on the shoulder, and stared at them both with a curious, almost amused expression.

"Good heavens, do you think he heard us?" Delia asked, barely moving her lips to speak.

"I think what he doesn't hear in this town could maybe fill a Post-It," Vanessa murmured, giving the man a nod of acknowledgment.

Gold nodded back with a wink, then continued on his way, heading in the direction of the town hall.

"Creepy little blighter," said Delia.

"And still the biggest fish in this puddle of a town," Vanessa sighed, then hitched her chin toward the intersection. "Green light," she prompted.

Delia shook herself, faced front, and drove on.

 

* * *

 

An hour and one raccoon-catered breakfast later ("They wash their hands before touching anything, darling, I promise; they're very thorough"), Ursula was feeling much more _the thing,_ as Cruella put it -- _thing_ enough to begin upholding her half of their bargain, at least.

The water level had definitely risen since Madam Medusa's death: the unlucky spot was reached by narrowboat, to which Cruella had reined two alligators she addressed as Brutus and Nero.

The beasts tugged them along at a sluggish but steady pace, cutting a swath through algae thick as carpeting, their periscopic eyes glowing a nearly identical bright green with Cruella's magic -- the same color, Ursula noticed, as her own.

 _Odd,_ she thought, idly swirling a tentacle in the water. The only other beings she'd known to have that particular shade of magic were all ...

But that was absurd. People like Cruella flaunted their pedigrees, if they had them; no one cited the superlatives in their lineage more than the squirearchy. Unless ...

"You said the diamond was a gift from your father," said Ursula. "Do you know how he came by it?"

Seated across from her, Cruella shrugged. "Stole it off a dwarf, for all I know. But no one ever laid claim to it, at least not while Mother was alive."

"Your father was a thief?"

"My father," Cruella sighed, "was an idea. One she clung to and I outgrew. But he paid my mother well for the services she provided him, and I intend to collect every ounce of inheritance that is my due from their brief yet lucrative union. All right?"

Of course. Why hadn't Ursula realized it before? The countless doors, the décor, Cruella's taste in cosmetics ... Hell Hall had been a pleasure house, and Medusa's form of address a literal job description.

"If you're so concerned with inheritances," Ursula asked, "what made you decide to close the doors of the family business?"

"Why? Are you interested in making a transaction?" Cruella looked her up and down with a hungry-eyed appreciation that didn't feel as feigned as Ursula wanted it to.

"Not at the moment," she said, careful not to sound the slightest bit curious -- and, despite herself, not to rule out the possibility of later, either.

"Pity." Cruella pouted, but shrugged off the declination with a short huff, and moved on. "I didn't close anything. They left -- the girls. Mother drove them off when I was quite young. She wasn't called the Mad Madam for nothing, you know."

"And yet I get the impression you never advertised for their return after she died."

"Well they'd hardly still be the crème de la crème they once were, darling. Probably all curdled milk by now, saddled with by-blows and syphilis."

"Yes, and no one new would respond, because the market for negotiable virtue is ever-shrinking."

"Oh? A queen with a bit of business acumen, are you? Do you have any idea the amount of nuisance an operation like that entails? The auditions, the squabbling, the sums -- the tax! No thank you, darling. Not my style."

"And hermitude is?"

Cruella's simper was patently specious. "That would appear to be the case."

"Then you're always dressed for a ball and keep your carriage clean as a shark's conscience -- even though, according to local gossip, you haven't left this _birthright_ of yours in years -- because you've, what, taken a vow of extravagance?"

Cruella rolled her eyes. "What I've _taken_ is my fill of this line of questioning. I'm not obligated to explain my choices, not to you, not to anyone."

Ursula's fingers lifted from her lap in a gesture of concession. After a moment, she tried a different tack.

"Your mother -- did she have magic, too?"

Cruella looked momentarily suspicious, but the enticement of further conversation -- about herself, no less -- was, as Ursula had predicted, too great a temptation, and she relented with a shake of her head.

"Not as such. Although she did know things, sometimes. Like if a girl hadn't declared a gift from a patron, even if she hadn't shown or told anybody about it. Of course, sometimes she also knew that she could walk on rainbows, so she wasn't widely consulted as an oracle."

"You _can_ walk on rainbows," Ursula pointed out.

Cruella blinked in surprise. "Can you really? Well, apparently lightning does strike twice on occasion. Can you also spontaneously sprout ten legs and three eyes? Because that was another of her little gems."

Ursula frowned. Ten legs and three eyes ... why did that sound familiar?

"Anyway, here we are."

Sure enough, the alligators had slowed to a halt just at the edge of a sudden bubbling out of the channel's width, and Ursula immediately sensed why: beneath its blanket of algae, the water here was much deeper than that of the rest of the bayou. It hadn't only risen between Medusa's death and now -- it had also bottomed out, quite literally, into a sinkhole.

Ursula's stomach tensed in consternation. It was a damn good thing she'd only agreed to look for the stupid rock. The Dark One in a hay field would have struggled to spin enough gold to cover the finder's fee a task like this would entail.

"It's somewhere that way, I think." Cruella gestured vaguely toward the south bank of the quasi-lake.

"Somewhere that way," Ursula dryly repeated. "Aren't you a font of specificity."

"Yes, just as you are one of wasting time. _One day,_ you promised, and so I don't want to see that splendid face of yours above the surface before sundown, unless you've the Devil's Eye in hand. Or other appendage."

"Splendid face?" Ursula smirked.

"I'm not saying it's your best feature," Cruella sniffily maintained, "but in the market of negotiable virtue, it wouldn't diminish your price."

"You already know my price, human. You'd do well to spend the next few hours refreshing your memory of it. In detail."

Ursula stepped backward off the stern of the boat before Cruella could muster a retort, and dropped into the water with scarcely more than a wavelet to mar her ingress.

 

* * *

 

" _Grape nut?_ " Delia exclaimed, scanning the flavor selection at Any Given Sundae. "Who in their right mind orders grape nut ice cream?"

The short man in the purple beanie who awaited their order behind the counter did something with his hands that made Vanessa snort a laugh.

Delia glanced between them, bemused. "Did I miss something?"

"He said Mayor Mills," Vanessa explained, smiling. "Mayor Mills orders grape nut ice cream."

"Oh? --Oh!" Delia's eyes widened as she glommed onto the implication. "You sign!"

Had she been twenty years younger, Vanessa might have bashfully scuffed the floor with her toe. "A little," she said. "Bobby here keeps me in practice sometimes. Don't get any ideas, though -- he hears just fine. Ain't that right, Bobby?"

Bobby looked puzzled and cupped his ear as if he'd had trouble making out what she'd said. Delia laughed, and Vanessa rolled her eyes.

They ordered two scoops apiece in paper cups, salted caramel for Vanessa, and for Delia--

"Blue raspberry, huh?"

Delia shrugged as they took their seats at a small table near the back of the parlor, both instinctively avoiding potential window-shoppers for different reasons.

"I like unnaturally-colored food. Always have done. When I was a child, I would add food dye to anything I could -- scrambled eggs, porridge, even milk."

"That's ... a little disgusting," Vanessa admitted. "But then, I used to eat the snails I'd find in our backyard pond, so I can't really talk."

"An early taste for escargot? That's quite the sophisticated palate for a child."

"Hah. Well, I haven't quite reached grape nut ice cream or purple porridge levels of worldliness, but my mouth knows its way around a delicacy or two."

Wow. _Wow,_ that had come out sounding so much more loaded than she'd intended.

But Delia merely smirked, one eyebrow lifting. "I'm sure it does."

Vanessa suddenly grew very aware of the speed at which her heart was beating. She swallowed thickly, and cast around for the nearest conversational current.

"You know, I've always wondered -- why blue raspberry? Why is raspberry the only flavor to be consistently recolored, and what made everyone decide that the only other color it could be was blue?"

"I've wondered that, too!" Delia exclaimed. "Where's the green cherry, the violet watermelon? Why the singular mutation?"

"Right? And, being so singular, is blue raspberry thus elevated, or ostracized?"

"Oh, elevated," Delia said firmly. "The rarer something is, the more prized it becomes. Like an endangered species."

"That's a relief. I'd hate to think the other flavors gang up on it for being different."

"Well, strawberry's a bit of a pillock."

Vanessa rolled her eyes. "Strawberry _would_ be. It's everyone's favorite. Always the first flavor to be marketed in any new fruit-based endeavor. It has no idea what it's like to be the underdog."

"Exactly. Its worldview is completely out of touch with reality."

"Strawberry privilege."

Delia grinned. Her tongue darted out to wet her lips, already tinted blue from her ice cream, and Vanessa smiled at the childishness of the image, so at odds with the severity the other woman's appearance sought to project.

"So," Delia asked, "what led you to learn sign language?"

"It was kind of an extracurricular thing in high school. We had this program where you could drop an elective and instead go to the special needs school down the road, help out in one of their classes, and earn a few social science credits for college. A lot of the kids there were non-verbal, so the instructors taught me the basics, and I picked other things up as we went along." Vanessa's shoulders bunched up in a modest shrug, and Delia tilted her head, smiling a little.

"Well, don't you have hidden depths."

Vanessa laughed. "I wasn't aware that I came off as shallow. But I don't really know that I do, anyway -- I mean, the kids were great, and the whole experience was an eye-opener, but honestly? I got involved because the only written work it required was one paper describing my experiences at the end of the year, and it got me off campus for an hour a day. Altruism was the furthest thing from my mind."

"Well still and all," Delia insisted. "If I'd had a gig like that at that age, I'd have been stashing spliffs in the back pocket of little Lennie's wheelchair and offering to take him for a walk every ten minutes."

"Come on, you couldn't have been _that_ bad."

"Classic punk rock problem child, I'm afraid. You'd have had nothing to do with the likes of me, Little Miss College Credits."

Vanessa pictured Delia at sixteen, all studs and safety pins and shredded fishnet, devil-may-care and too-cool-for-school. She could absolutely imagine the surreptitious looks she would have shot her over the tops of textbooks, intrigued and envious in ways she would still have been a year away from allowing herself to accept.

"I wouldn't be so sure."

"Oh no?" Delia asked. "Would you have been the Claire to my Bender, a good girl with a taste for bad seeds?"

"Well, sadly, I was more of a Brian than a Claire in high school," Vanessa admitted. "But I would have let you hide your dope in my underwear."

A wry smile bent Delia's mouth. "Well ... Benders are usually just phases for Claires, anyway. Bunch of strawberries, Claires."

Vanessa wasn't sure what to make of that. That Delia ignored the obvious conclusions to be drawn from the implication that Vanessa would have welcomed Delia's hand down her pants was a red flag; that Delia wouldn't have wanted to be merely an experiment in Vanessa's adolescent love life looked, in a certain light, like a green one.

Vanessa swallowed down both possibilities with another spoonful of ice cream. She shouldn't look for things like that, not yet -- maybe not ever. It was important that Delia know Vanessa's desire to help her leave her husband didn't hinge on the idea that she leave him specifically for Vanessa, and that their friendship didn't hinge on her leaving him at all. It was a tightrope walk of a situation, and the further Vanessa stepped toward its precarious center, the more conscientious she became of how many potential missteps there were to be made. She couldn't overthink the wrong things, couldn't push too hard, too quickly in _any_ direction, lest Delia come to mistake the meadow they were seeding for just another minefield.

Of course, this awareness was at best a cardboard levee against Vanessa's rising fondness for the other woman. Most of the time, Delia seemed to be trying to take up as little space as possible, but for all she slouched and curled in on herself, she had a remarkably animated face, and a jewel-like wit that caught the light increasingly often from inside its rough of diffident apologies. Vanessa didn't consider herself a clingy person, but every time they stood next to one another, she found herself consciously fighting the desire to touch her -- not lasciviously, but simply: to wrap an arm around Delia's waist and rest her chin on her shoulder, or place a hand at the small of her back. She did her best to chalk it up to protective instincts, or a want of basic human closeness she'd found easier to ignore when there was no one with whom she'd hoped to be close; she did her best, but her best did little to diminish the unsettling, fluttery feeling in her stomach whenever she caught herself wondering what Delia would feel like -- how warm she would be, and how she might kiss; how soft her skin, and the scent of it.

Vanessa fingered her necklace in thought as Delia drove her home, tracing and retracing the tiny ridges in the silver nautilus pendant, as familiar as her own fingerprints, while over the stereo an acoustically-backed Sir Jagger lamented graceless ladies and dull, aching pains.

"You sing quite well," said Delia, eyes darting between Vanessa and the road.

Vanessa tensed, throat closing up like a startled clam.

"Oh," she croaked out, then cleared her throat and stammered, "I didn't-- I hadn't realized I was doing that out loud. Sometimes I just zone out and ... _lalala._ "

Delia smiled. "Well, as far as unconscious habits go, it's a very pretty one. Certainly more attractive than biting one's nails or grinding one's teeth. I do that, grind my teeth while I'm sleeping. Always wake up with a headache. And Andrew hates it. Sometimes I'll wake up to him shoving a sock in my mouth to get me to stop."

"Jesus." Anger bloomed in Vanessa's chest, shocking in its immediacy and intensity. "That's fucked up. He shouldn't do that to you."

Delia's laugh was reflexive and hollow-sounding, like a sigh wrenched into a giggle. "I'll admit, it's not exactly breakfast in bed. Particularly when the sock's not clean."

Vanessa didn't laugh, at all. "That's awful. You don't deserve that."

Delia kept quiet, and for once Vanessa had to bite her tongue to keep from filling in the silence with everything else she didn't deserve, and everything Andrew did. It was the first time either of them had brought him in conversation since their first lunch together, and Delia had no distracting dogs to tend to this time, no other room to which she could escape. How she might react if she felt backed up against a wall wasn't something Vanessa wanted to test just yet.

They pulled up alongside Vanessa's apartment complex -- the original Storybrooke cannery, before the fishing industry had grown and new, more efficient dockside warehouses allowed for its conversion, in the '80s, into lofts -- and idled for a few seconds curbside.

"So what do you think?" Vanessa asked. "Warmer?"

"Hm." Delia tilted her head side-to-side in a show of deliberation. "Well, I'm not convinced it was the ice cream," she qualified, "but ... yes."

And at that -- along with the mischievous glint in Delia's eyes that accompanied it -- Vanessa definitely felt warmer. Especially her face.

"Good," she said. "As long as the desired effect has been achieved. I'll see you tomorrow, then?"

"Wild horses couldn't drag me away, darling."

Vanessa grinned and got out of the car, but hesitated on the pavement, and bent for one last look inside.

"Hey, since you know where I live now -- if you need anything, don't be a stranger, okay? Seriously, anything, at anytime."

"It's a promise," Delia replied. "And-- ... Thank you."

For more, Vanessa understood, than just the invitation.

She winked and shut the door, and the Cougar drove off, its clamorous engine purring big-cat-loud.

 

* * *

 

Ursula had excellent eyes. They required very little light by which to see, and in the event poor conditions affected her visibility, she could rely on the sensitivity of her tentacles to compose images of texture in her mind.

This sinkhole, however, was as close to blind as she had ever felt. It was less than twenty fathoms deep, by her estimation, and so a slightly smaller kettle of fish than the one she'd been anticipating, but something about it felt ... _more._ It was darker than it should have been, even allowing for the skim of algae overlaying its surface; dark like Cruella's attic was dark, as though something of the house had followed the diamond down.

It wasn't long before Ursula's spatial awareness was paying more heed to the subtle shifts in current and pressure than to the deepening gloom -- a gloom she nearly added to herself with a startled burst of ink, when two long, slippery strangers brushed up against her sides and wove between her tentacles in familiar figure-eights.

Ursula exhaled the last of the air in her lungs with an annoyed sigh.

"I thought I told you two to wait in the bay?" she grumbled, but reached out regardless to stroke the feathery dorsal fins of her own pair of pets.

The green morays weren't verbal, per se, but Ursula could hear them in much the same impressionistic way as her tentacles could taste through touch, in immaterial bursts of emotion and concept.

 _With you is better,_ said Flotsam to her left, nibbling lightly at one of her fingers with his slivered-glass teeth.

 _Help you,_ his twin, Jetsam, agreed. _Better._

"Well, you're here now, anyway. I'm looking for a necklace -- gold, with a big, white stone."

Proud to have been given a mission, the eels slithered excitedly around her torso in their version of a hug before swimming off in the indicated direction.

Ursula felt her tentacles settle at last into the velvety bed of the sinkhole. She conjured a bubble of light, fixed it to float like the lure of an anglerfish a few feet above her head, and followed them.

 

* * *

 

It wasn't until Delia had turned the corner that Vanessa noticed the small U-Haul trailer hitched to the back of Mary Margaret's Jeep parallel-parked in front of the complex.

That was weird. She hadn't mentioned anything about moving out.

She was halfway up the stairs to her apartment when an expletive and an order to look out below dropped down from the second floor, alongside a red-and-gray running shoe.

Luckily, years of rescuing beer bottles from the not-so-coordinated efforts of the inebriated had made a catcher's mitt of her right hand, saving her from a size seven-and-a-half kick in the teeth.

"Wow," remarked an unfamiliar blonde peering over the second floor banister. "Nicely done."

"Thanks," said Vanessa, "I think."

The woman winced, and made her way downstairs. She looked about thirtyish, pretty in a hard sort of way, with well-muscled arms and the capable, stalwart presence of someone who was exactly who they appeared to be. "I'm so sorry about that. I had too much crap piled up in one box and the shoe just glass-slippered right out of it."

Vanessa handed off the shoe in question. "Well, we're not having this conversation as you drive me to the emergency room, so don't worry about it."

"Pretty lousy first impression for a new neighbor, huh?"

Vanessa frowned. "So Mary Margaret _is_ moving out?"

"Oh, no, she's still here. I'm just an addition. She let me borrow her Jeep for the haul from Boston so I wouldn't have to rent a truck there and tow my Bug back. I'm Emma, by the way." She stuck out her hand.

"Vanessa." They shook. Emma's grip was warm and firm. "Boston, huh? You must be the one the whole town's been buzzing about these past few days."

"Mayor Mills' new gardener?" A tight smile somewhere on the spectrum of chagrined acceptance stretched the blonde's lips. "That would be me."

Vanessa's eyebrows shot up in sympathy. "Good luck with that. I'm just across the hall in 4, if you ever find yourself at a loss for a cup of sugar -- and at the Rabbit Hole downtown most nights, should the recipe call for something stronger."

Emma's smile relaxed into something almost genuine when she sensed she wasn't being weighed and measured. "I'll keep that in mind, thanks."

 

* * *

 

"Anything?" Ursula asked as Flotsam and Jetsam rendezvoused with her from the south side of the sinkhole.

Her pets proved that eels could indeed look dejected. They'd been combing the sinkhole for the better part of the afternoon -- dusk would soon be upon them, and while Ursula would have her payment regardless of her success, the idea of returning to the surface empty-handed rankled her. It wasn't that she gave a damn whether or not Cruella ever recovered her thousand-carat inheritance, but to fail, even at this ridiculous task, made her pride itch.

 _No stone,_ they admitted in echoey tandem. _Only eye._

Ursula blinked. "Eye?"

Flotsam's head bobbed once in the affirmative, while Jetsam elaborated, _In a quiet man._

A quiet man -- their term for a skeleton. Dead men tell no tales.

But an intact eye in these conditions? The kill would have to be extremely fresh; certainly nothing Ursula would be interested in.

Even so, she'd never been able to chalk anything up to coincidence without giving it a second look. Resentment had made her cynical, but it was the one memory of her mother's lilting voice that, despite herself, she could never completely disregard: _The most important thing you will learn in this life, my little mermaid, is that every so often, things will come across your path that will connect, like the pictures in the stars. Things with a touch of destiny about them. Keep a weather eye out, for them be the waves you must ride, or you corrupt your purpose, and so yourself._

After all these years, Ursula had no illusions about what "purpose" was left to her, but she was compelled to connect whatever dots she discovered into constellations of meaning, even if she was no longer capable of charting a course by them.

"Show me," she ordered, and the morays ribboned off, Ursula at their tails.

The sinkhole wasn't perfectly round, but oyster-shaped, owing to a curve in the bayou's river, and the narrower end of it -- what Ursula thought of as its hinge -- was tiered like a massive inverted staircase, its façade pocked with limestone caves.

It was into one of these caves that the eels led her, and they hadn't far to go before the quiet man of which they'd spoken became visible.

The skeleton was incomplete -- a partial ribcage, a skull, a scattering of vertibrae and the long, slender bones of an arm -- but it was brown with age and grime, and had long ago been picked clean of all flesh, ocular organs included. Had her pets been at all given to practical jokes, Ursula would have scoffed and scolded them without further examination of their find; but they were largely phlegmatic, straightforward creatures, and she had never known them to lie.

She sank closer to the skeleton, and lifted the skull from the silt. Something heavy knocked against the back side of its teeth, all of which were still present and accounted for in their locked-tight jaw.

Carefully, Ursula reached up through the hollow behind the mandible, and worked free a chainless diamond pendant the size of a sea urchin, slimy and bemired by its years spent underwater, but impossible to mistake for anything else.

She looked sideways at her pets. "Neither of you saw this?"

 _Saw that,_ said the eels. _No stone._

"No stone," Ursula murmured, staring at the gem, "only eye ..." She turned it slowly in her hand, watching its faceted surface wink in the light, as the dots connected in her mind.

That was why none of Cruella's animals could find it -- they saw it for what it was, not what it appeared to be. Was this why she'd had an "inkling" that Ursula would be able to find it? --But if she knew the diamond wasn't actually a diamond, why wouldn't she have simply given her pets more accurate instructions?

It didn't make any sense.

Ursula peered into the hollow sockets where Madam Medusa's eyes had been, and wondered which devil's -- or De Vil's -- it was that she held, enchanted, in her other hand.


End file.
